1. Time to hire
Ideally you want to hire fast and quick, but naturally clients and convoluted processes don’t always make that an option. However, find out your average hiring time and use your insights to shorten the process as much as you can. You might use your CRM or ATS to do this, or it might even be from the minute a job ad goes out, but ensure you define it and then work to half it.
2. Cost per hire
Money talks, especially in recruitment. By calculating job board fees, advertising spend, consultancy time, lost productivity from open roles and manager time spent interviewing, you can start to gauge a clear figure and find out how much your hiring process is really costing you. By identifying the cost you can also understand what can be cut and where the hiring cycle could be streamlined.
3. Email metrics
Whether you do this in Outlook or an automated marketing platform like HubSpot, there are effective ways to understand who’s opening your emails, time taken to open, reply rates and unopened messages. It will allow you to see what’s working in your agency, but also where consultants might improve their own outreach by crafting more personalised messages.
4. Placements and rebate data
The obvious metric is the placements made, money earned and how many rebates per quarter. Naturally these insights give you overall performance and company growth information and should be measured, but drilling down into more granular detail will give you a better overview of your business, and you certainly shouldn’t only rely on these.
5. Productivity per head
To understand how your consultants are performing and impacting the business, measure your productivity per head and always aim to increase that figure. This varies across industry and sector, but it’s a key piece of data if you’re wondering why conversion rates aren’t high.
6. Response rate
With so much passive talent, your consultants are constantly on the hunt to reach out to suitable candidates, so monitoring your response rate is a clear indication of how well their outreach is working. Take your total responses, divided by the total outreach, and then multiply by one hundred, and you’ll arrive at your response rate. For example,
40 responses / 100 emails X 100 = 40% response rate
There is a world of data your recruitment agency could be gathering to gain better insights into your candidate experience, hiring cycle or employee engagement, and there’s definitely no need to be walking in the dark when you don’t have to be.